President Calvin Coolidge was made an honorary member of the Sioux Nation,
and a special ceremony was performed in a stone lodge on a North Dakota
tribe's reservation.
After this ceremony, President Coolidge officially apologized for the
warfare between the United States
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icon to follow us on Facebook.and the various native nations that it
had assimilated over the years, and vowed, "We can never give back to
these people the lives lost nor the time spent imprisoned, but there is
something we can give back". Huge portions of the western United States
were pledged by the Coolidge administration to any native nation that
wished to claim them.
This created the "Great Indian Rush" of '27 in which tens of thousands of
Native Americans left their reservations to make a new life for themselves
in the west. After the Great Depression hit, even more Native Americans
took advantage of the western land, and the New Nations, as they became
known, were the most prosperous region of the country. Many non-natives
trekked to the New Nations to plead for work, and soon there was friction
between the white man and the native again. This spilled over into
physical violence after the Whitley Incident, which was allegedly staged
by the Ku Klux Klan.
For a few years in the 1930's the New Nations were able to handle their
own territory, but as more whites came to battle them, they were forced to
turn to the government in Washington, DC and ask for assistance. Although
President Roosevelt would have preferred dealing with the war situation
that was brewing in Europe, the internal strife in his nation forced him
to send troops to keep order. In 1940, German and Japanese agents sparked
a confrontation at Tashunka-Uitco in the Rockies, a couple of hundred
miles north of Denver. This turned the tense situation into all-out war as
both sides felt that they had been pushed too far - New Nations President
Carl Sitting Bull ousted all white settlers in the New Nations, and the
white settlers called out to Washington for help to keep their land; also,
the states around the New Nations were agitating for Washington to "do
something" about the trouble within their borders. President Roosevelt
ordered in troops, much to his regret.